When to Check in with Your Sponsor

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Anyone who has completed rehab should feel gratitude and honor the achievement of getting to this point. Being clean and sober is the first step towards a long lasting and healthy recovery. A sponsor is a person who has been through the experience and can offer support through the process.   Sponsors Self-denial can be

Things to Share With Other Addicts in Your Recovery Meetings

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Sharing your alcoholism and addiction stories and participating in the sharing sessions at recovery meetings are important components of addiction recovery. Individuals will be naturally concerned over the amount of information that they should share and the confidentiality of the information, and they may be reluctant to participate fully in sharing sessions. Initially, the confidentiality

Overcoming Boredom When You Are New to Sobriety

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Alcoholics and drug addicts typically go through a common array of emotions in an addiction recovery program. Following the initial period of physical withdrawal, they will experience periods of exhaustion, then elation as they enjoy their first days away from the substances that they have abused. They inevitably hit a period of boredom and fatigue

Being a Man Means Admitting When You Screwed Up

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History is replete with examples of men who have proven the aphorism that “the cover-up is worse than the crime.” It may be out of vogue in popular culture to discuss how a person can achieve or improve a level of  “manliness”, but admitting and taking ownership of mistakes is a hallmark of maturity and

Equine Therapy Helps Get Your Feet on the Ground

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Animals have been incorporated into therapies for a variety of conditions. Therapy dogs, for example, are common in senior citizen centers, nursing homes, and hospitals, where they are used to brighten the days of patients confined to their beds or hospital rooms for extended treatments. The use of horses in equine therapy is currently a

Alcoholism Withdrawal Symptoms

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    Alcohol normally depresses a person’s central nervous system. When a person consumes large amounts of alcohol for a longer period of time, his brain and central nervous system adjust and rewire themselves to speed up and to accommodate that excessive alcohol consumption. When that consumption suddenly ends, the alcoholic’s central nervous system reacts

How Methadone is Used to Treat Heroin Addiction

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Individuals who are addicted to heroin and other opiate products, including oxycodone, will experience severe and often-dangerous physical and psychological withdrawal symptoms when they stop using these drugs. Those symptoms are cited as a primary reason for relapses when heroin addicts are in rehab. Methadone is used to ease the worst of those symptoms and

Putting a Stop to Your Self-Harm

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In their hard rock song, Hurt, the Nine Inch Nails sing the lyric “I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel. I focus on the pain, the only thing that’s real.” This lyric accurately depicts self-harm as a mechanism to cope with numbness and buried pain. If you have adopted this coping mechanism

How Meditation can Reduce your Anxiety

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Anxiety feeds on our concerns for what we don’t know and can’t control. In life, there are many things we don’t know, uncertainties that haunt or beguile us. This sense of worry about the future or things beyond our immediate control is what vexes so many that contend with anxiety. Things like giving a speech,

An Introduction to a Traditional 12-Step Addiction Recovery Program

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Traditional 12-step addiction recovery programs have been endorsed by numerous public health organizations, including the U.S. National Institute of Health, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the American Psychiatric Association, and the U.S. Department of Veterans’ Affairs, as a cost effective approach to addiction treatment and recovery. They have been proven effective to